A pilot program at San Jose State University in California is helping students convert social networking prowess into skills useful to forward-looking companies that want to use "social business" to improve their operations. A professor teaching in the pilot believes the lessons he's adding into his classes ought to be part of every student's coursework.
The idea of social business is to apply social software to improve and accelerate how work gets done on the inside of the firewall. Whereas social branding -- blogs, wikis, bookmarks, videos, message boards, Facebook, Twitter, and imilar tools -- is increasingly being used by companies to communicate with the external world, what's often missing is the application of those same tools and techniques to create an open, supportive culture internally. ...